public library leaders and the status quo: vocabulary and ideas for better bureaucracy
Last month, I published a paper called, “Public libraries as bureaucracies: Toward a more critical perspective,” in Public Libraries Quarterly. This paper was the result of several years spent grappling with critical theory and my own experience as a public librarian, manager, and director, yet is by no means an end of the difficult work that remains to be done in regards to the ways that public libraries enact bureaucracy, and themselves operate within larger and more complex social constructs of bureaucracy and capitalism. Some of the ideas that I came across in my research relate particularly to the challenges public libraries are facing at present, especially vis a vis responding meaningfully to calls for racial justice in our communities and workplaces. That this vocabulary seems to be missing from public librarianship is no accident, it is evidence of the ways bureaucracy reinforces the status quo.
The concepts I most wish to highlight at this juncture include:
“bureaucratic balance of power principle,”
“soft touch hegemony,”
“interpretive labor,”
libraries as “undertheorized spaces,”
“threat of force,” and, last but not least . . .
praxis.
Let me begin, though, by defining bureaucracy. The most succinct definition of a bureaucracy is “any location where any numberof people gather to discuss the allocation of resources of any kind at all” (Graeber, 2015, p. 21). Of course, this is a very simplistic understanding of a difficult and nebulous phenomenon. The way I would explain bureaucracy, in a nutshell, would be any system that aims to enable efficiency, predictability, and calculability, but which likely also produces inefficiencies, absurdities, and inequalities. Bureaucracies are underpinned by control through non-human technologies, and ultimately, “threat of force,” an ugly truth that deserves the attention it has just begun receiving from public library practitioners in recent months, and which I will explore in greater detail in what follows.
First, the “bureaucratic balance of power principle,” is quite straightforward; it states:
It is interesting to look for this principle at play now, as libraries reckon with and respond to the Black Lives Matter movement. Indeed, it is easier to release a statement, put up a sign, or strike a task force, than to enact substantive, radical, systemic change to upend racism in public libraries. In fact, these responses I’ve named represent more bureaucracy, and to that end a concept that I did not intend to introduce in this post: the iron law of liberalism, which holds that any initiative taken to reduce bureaucracy will actually have the opposite effect. David Graeber, who as best as I can tell coined this term, was speaking to market reforms and government policies, but I don’t think it is a stretch to see how it applies also to governance and committees and so many of the ways that we try to move change forward in public libraries.
Task forces and committees serve as a good segue to the notion of “soft touch hegemony,” a phrase that Karen Nicholson applies in, “The McDonaldization of academic libraries and the values of transformational change,” to describe the ways that libraries leverage empowerment to their strategic advantage. Examples of soft-touch hegemony in public libraries include coaching employees towards resilience and self-care, mindfulness trainings, team agreements, and scrum and self-organizing teams in Agile, each of which can serve as an effective and powerful tool for fostering healthy and positive environments, or can inadvertently produce the opposite. Here it is interesting to think of the theory that a bureaucracy will follow “the direction which the powers using the apparatus give to it” (Weber, as translated in Gerth and Mills, 1946, p. 230).
Let’s return to the example of a public library striking a committee or task force to make recommendations as to building diversity and equity into their organization, and creating a safe and welcoming environment for all visitors, especially BIPOC, people who identify as LGBTQ2S+, and people with disabilities. This could be a good idea, but does it place an imbalance of interpretive labor on the shoulders on people in your organization who are already oppressed? Interpretive labor, as I understand it, describes how the work of understanding power dynamics falls to the people who are disempowered. Not only do the people who are disenfranchised need to understand what makes their oppressors tick, they must also do the work of calling out injustices, for example, calling out racism. Ironically, the people in positions of power have greater access to information (I note, ironically, that the paper of my own that I reference within this post is beyond a paywall), education, and opportunities to understand their privilege, but outsource this labor to others instead of taking it upon themselves.
In fact, public libraries—and the greater forces of financialization and capitalism—enact bureaucracy to the effect of maintaining environments where the work of understanding is purposefully precluded. For this reason, libraries can be described as “undertheorized spaces,” in which emphasis is placed upon the practical, tangible, measurable aspects of library work. To quote from my own paper:
Nicholson and Seale have called this the “politics of practicality,” a phenomenon that “acts to reproduce patriarchy, neoliberal ideology, neutrality, and white supremacy” (2017, p. 5). Popowich, also in the spirit of critical librarianship, observed that in libraries, rationality, and practicality, have resulted in “an untheorized practice,” that in turn, “reproduces the inequalities and oppressions of the system even while it allows the system to keep functioning” (Popowich, 2017, p. 62).
Hence, public libraries have not been in the habit of creating space and time for staff to read, reflect, and discuss Black Lives Matter, or Truth and Reconciliation, or disability studies, or feminism, et cetera, on work time. I have often thought it is ironic that library work is not typically considered “knowledge work,” as we are not known for producing new ideas and systems, so much as we are at reproducing existing information and systems. To the ends that they represent practical, and undertheorized environments, David Graeber describes bureaucracies as “dead zones of the imagination.” How ironic is it that libraries so often self-describe as valuing imagination, access to information, and innovation, while not investing in their employees’ development by paying for this work? Another way that these practical, undertheorized dead zones persist is by keeping people in need. People who are preoccupied with food, rent, and money worries are not as free to engage in politics, theory, and creative pursuits.
A recent article in School Library Journal, “What if paying library staff and teachers to read IS part of the anti-racist work we could, and should, be doing?” made two excellent points about the usual practice of not paying library staff for time spent reading (and I would add, researching):
One, you have library staff that don’t read because they would have to do so on their own time, which means that all of the book knowledge they have comes from whatever they read in school or casually on their own time. Spoiler alert, whatever they read in school was most likely predominantly written by a white male author and is part of the traditional cannon, whichever age group they were reading and studying. And two, if you do have well read library staff, that means that they are reading on their own time and the library or school is benefiting from the unpaid labor of their staff. Librarianship and education are two of the professions which benefit a lot from both the unpaid labor of their staff and staff spending their own money on materials to help enhance the program.
Library leaders seeking ways to practice anti-racism can also foster the right circumstances for growth and ingenuity by creating space and time for reading, research, reflection, and discourse, within paid work time.
When I was writing “Public libraries as bureaucracies,” I struggled with what seemed like it would be a radical and unpopular notion that threatened any vestiges of vocational awe: public libraries, as bureaucracies, rest upon “threat of force.” As I shared in my paper, though, the very example that David Graeber drew upon, in The Utopia of Rules, was that of someone being removed from a library. From a SWOT perspective, in which opportunities and threats are examined as factors external to an organization, threat of force underpins a society that rests upon property ownership and the division of wealth, there is no getting around it. But within public libraries, we have some control over when and how often we summon the “armed men,” i.e., the police, to our libraries. We also have control over our codes of conduct, and the ways that staff are trained to apply these expectations. This represents one of the most significant areas in which library leaders have any real power to reform bureaucracy in public libraries.
Critical librarianship still is not too well known, I have found in my personal experience, working primarily in public libraries, and as follows the above thoughts on libraries as practical, undertheorized spaces, i.e. “dead zones of the imagination,” but it is a movement which brings critical theory into librarianship. Within critical librarianship, “praxis” is used to describe “the dialectical unity of theory and practical activity” (Popowich, 2017, p. 62). This would entail “both a critique of institutions and practices, and a practice of solidarity with all those who . . . find it difficult or impossible to speak or act for themselves” (Popowich, 2017, p. 62). Praxis, to me, represents owning the personal and the political within librarianship, and taking practical action. Within public libraries, hierarchical structures grant more power to managers and directors, who in turn have more control and influence over bureaucracy, and thus, ability to exert change. Recalling the above quote to the effect that a bureaucracy follows the direction of the powers that be, it is incumbent on public library leaders, especially, to develop their own praxes, taking the necessary steps to learn and understand their own privilege and status, and subsequently examining and dismantling the systems that uphold the outdated, unequal status quo, in the public libraries in which they work, and in their communities and own homes.
Gerth, H.H. and Mills, W. 1946. From Max Weber: Essays in sociology. New York: Oxford University Press.
Graeber, D. 2015. The utopia of rules: On technology, stupidity, and the secret joys of bureaucracy. Brooklyn, NY and London: Melville House.
Nicholson, K.P. 2015. The McDonaldization of academic libraries and the values of transformational change. College & Research Libraries, 76 (3): 328-338.
Popowich, S. 2017. ‘Ruthless criticism of all that exists’: Marxism, technology, and library work, in The politics of theory and the practice of critical librarianship, ed. K. P. Nicholson and M. Seale, 39-66. Sacramento, CA: Library Juice Press.